In back, a monocore, in front, a stack of baffles.
October 18, 2024
By Patrick Sweeney
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Anyone who has spent more than a few minutes looking into silencers and their use and purchase, has heard the word “baffles.” These are the guts, the interior, the mysterious inside parts that turn the raging column of hot gases your rifle muzzle belches into unicorn farts. They take the noise that would damage your hearing and turn it into a disturbance that only hurts the sensibilities of snowflakes. The baffles are the internal dividers in your suppressor that slow the progress of the gas plume your muzzle releases, and uses their mass and the time they add to the release, to suck the heat out of the gases. The cooler gas has a lower pressure than it did when hot, (that’s part of the Ideal Gas Law) and so lower pressure means fewer decibels. Yep, your suppressor turns sound into heat. That’s how you just melted your gun case. Baffles come in two main types of assembly or construction; a stack of baffles, or a single chunk of metal, called a monocore.
Neglect cleaning your pistol or rimfire suppressor, and this is what happens (top). This was the original approach to simple silencer design. Yes, it works, but it doesn’t stand up well to use on rifles (bottom right). The baffle clearance on some designs has a notch, or tear- drop shape, to create turbulence. SURVEY
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The “stack o’baffles” approach is the original. Take two tubes, one small enough to slide snugly inside the other. Chop the smaller one into segments. Now, slide a segment in, drop in a tight-fitting washer, then a segment, then a washer, you get the idea. That’s the simplest, and it has problems. The washers will bend, or shift, and once something gets in the way of a bullet, your impromptu silencer busts open. To solve that, you weld things together. In the early, or crude, days, this would simply be a tack-weld to hold thing together. The next step up was to shape the baffles. By taking the flat washers and making them into little funnels, you are more effective in diverting and slowing the gases. You can also give them short cylindrical skirts, so they won’t tip, and you don’t have to weld. (But welding was still a good thing, and often done on high-end silencers) Or, you can simply use the skirts themselves, welded together, to become your external tube and give up the whole “tube in a tube” design approach. Just weld the baffles to each other, and viola, you have a tube with baffles inside it. One drawback to this is that you can’t use different materials in your construction. It has to all be the same metal, and a weld-able one, at that.
Oh, an extra detail: if you look at the funnel that is your baffle, you may see (some don’t have them) a notch nipped out of the small end of it. This is there to generate turbulence. Turbulence creates drag, and in most other uses, it is bad. A high-drag bullet slows down faster and loses velocity. A high-drag vehicle has suck-y mileage. A high-drag social event? You get the idea, but in a suppressor, turbulence, adding drag, slows the gases exit out of the muzzle, which is a good thing. Some suppressors you can’t weld. Rimfire and pistol-caliber silencers have to be disassembled, in order to clean them. If you don’t clean them, then you end up with a heavy tube that isn’t so quiet anymore because it is packed full of powder and bullet residue. So, they get the tube-in-a-tube design but can still benefit from some advances. One would be the baffle with a skirt there to keep the powder residue from locking the baffles inside of the tube.
A big advance in suppressor durability is the fully- welded, no-external-tube design. Just weld the baffle stack as one piece, and call it done (left). This is the famous suppressor, with a recorded 108,000 rounds through it. Doesn’t look high mileage at all now, does it? Oh, and while we’re here, you clean a suppressor (the ones that can be taken apart) by taking them apart and cleaning the parts. You do not, I repeat, DO NOT poke a cleaning rod with brush, patch, or anything, down your suppressor. If you lose something off of the cleaning rod, you have just created a soon-to-happen baffle strike, and then a big repair/replacement bill. No, if it can be taken apart, you do that. If it can’t (these would be the rifle-caliber, fully-welded ones) you shoot it until it is too hot to touch, and in so-doing you will have burned out the residues. You’re thinking “But, I don’t want to over-heat my suppressor, I don’t want to wear it out.” Trust me, you won’t. I attended a class held by Dr. Phil Dater, the guru of suppressors (and founder of Gemtech), and he had a demo silencer to show us, one that had been cut in half down the middle. “OK, this was a 5.56 suppressor, anyone care to guess how many rounds have been through it?” It looked a bit tired, but not nearly worn out. I stuck a hand up. “Doc, I suspect the way you are posing the question, that it is a seriously high-round-count can. Thirty thousand rounds?” The answer was more than interesting. “Your answer is higher than any I’ve gotten, but it still isn’t even close, a hundred and eight.” A 5.56 suppressor with 108,000 rounds logged through it, and it did not look like it was ready for retirement when it got sliced open. Since a solidly built 5.56 suppressor is going to outlast ten barrels, (unless you do full-auto mag dumps and get it red-hot, literally red-dot), so don’t worry about it.
Baffle shapes can be whatever the designer thinks works, or measurements say works. Then, there is a different way to build suppressors, called the monocore. Okay, here we do not craft individual baffles, to be stuffed into a tube. Instead, we fire up the cutting-edge CNC machinery, and make a solid bar that will slide inside of our tube-to-be-a-silencer. You can thread the bottom of the tube, and the base of your bar, to screw them together, or you can thread the front end of the bar and then screw a cap on to hold the tube in place. Then, it is a simple matter to take the bar and cut holes across it to create voids that are...baffles. Your “baffle stack” is now all one piece, with the bore down the center, so nothing to shift, no need to weld anything, and the problem of dropping a delicate baffle and bending it is not a problem anymore. Oh, you can drop and ding a monocore, but you are unlikely to bend it enough to be a problem, plus there’s an added benefit. Legally, the part of your suppressor that bears the serial number is the suppressor. Let’s say something goes seriously wrong, and you get a baffle strike on your monocore suppressor. OK, unscrew the tube, package up the monocore and send it in for repair or replacement. No paperwork required because the tube IS the silencer which stays in your safe until the repaired or replacement monocore arrives.
Especially on rimfires, baffles get dirty. Incredibly dirty. So clean after every use. Now, the suppressor mavens are going to tell you there are problems with monocores, they have “first round pop” problems, or they are heavy, or they cause male-pattern baldness. Maybe yes, maybe no, maybe you were going to go bald anyway. The difference in sound, if there is one, is going to be small, and you’ll probably need a sound meter (a real one, not your cell phone with an app) to detect it. Monocores are easy to clean, and easy to reassemble after cleaning, and for me, that makes them worth whatever theoretical difference in sound they might or might not have. (I’ve measured both, baffled and monocore suppressors, which had or didn’t have first round pop that could be measured.) What is the “best” design? Which suppressor is the quietest? That depends on what you want from of life (a great song by The Tubes, from 1975). Some people want light weight. Some want maximum quiet. Some want low cost. Some just want bragging rights over their gun club buddies. For most of those, and most other desires, what’s inside your suppressor isn’t a big deal. So, there you have it, the inside scoop on what’s inside your suppressor. Or the one you are thinking of buying.
Some baffles snap together, so they protect the external tube from gunk. Still, clean like you are a Chicago voter; early and often.